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U.-3, DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR 

Franklin K. Lane, Secretary 



GUMPSES 

OF OUR 

NATIONAL 
PARKS 



$ 



CONTENTS 

I. — Characteristics 3 

II. — The Rocky Mountain National Park 7 

III._The Mesa Verde National Park H 

IV.— The Yellowstone National Park 14 

v.— The Glacier National Park 19 

VI. — Mount Rainier National Park 22 

VII.— Crater Lake National Park 25 

VIII.— The Yosemite National Park 27 

IX.— The Sequoia and General Grant National Parks . . 29 

X. — The Hot Springs Reservation 32 

XI. — The Grand Canyon (National monument administered 

by Department of Agriculture) 33 



WASHINGTON 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFHCE 

1916 



THE ]VATIOIVAlL, PArtliS ^Vr A. OLAlVCIi: 

Clii'onoloslcally In tlie oraei* Of tlieir c?x-oatloii C. I (O d 

[Number, 14; Total Area, 7,290 Square Miles] , "]{ Cp 11 



NATIONAL 




AREA 


'^/i> 


PARKS 
in order of 


LOCATION 


in 

square 


DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERISTICS 


creation 




miles 




Hot Springs 


Middle 


li 


46 hot springs possessing curative properties— Many hotels and 


1832 


Arkansas 




boarding houses — 20 bathhouses under public control. 


Yellowstone 


North- 


3,348 


More geysers than in all rest of world together— Boiling 


1872 


western 




springs— Mud volcanoes— Petrified forests— Grand Canyon 




Wyoming 




of the Yellowstone, remarkable for gorgeous coloring— Large 
lakes— Many large streams and waterfalls— Vast wilderness 
inhabited by deer, elk, bison, moose, antelope, bear, moun- 
tain sheep, beaver, etc., constitutmg greatest wild bird and 
animal preserve in world— Altitude 6,000 to 11,000 feet- 
Exceptional trout fishing. 


Yosemite 


Middle 


1, 12.j 


Valley of world-famed beauty — Lofty cliffs — Romantic vistas — 


1890 


eastern 




Many waterfalls of extraordinary height— 3 groves of big 




California 




trees— High Sierra— Large areas of snowy peaks— Waterwheel 
falls— Good trout fishing. 


Sequoia 


Middle 


237 


The Big Tree national park — 12,000 sequoia trees over 10 feet in 


1890 


eastern 




diameter, some 25 to 36 feet in diameter— Towering mountain 




California 




ranges— Startling precipices— Fine trout fisiiing. 


General Grant 


Middle 


4 


Created to preserve the celebrated General Grant Tree, 35 feet 


1890 


eastern 




in diameter — 6 mile^ from Sequoia National Park and imder 




California 




same management. 


Mount Rainier 


West 


324 


Largest accessible single peak glacier system— 14 glaciers, some 


1899 


central 




of large size— Forty-eight square miles of glacier, fifty to five- 




Washington 




hundred feet thick— Wonderful sub-alpine wild flower fields. 


Crater Lake 


South- 


249 


Lake of extraordinary blue in crater of extinct volcano, no 


1902 


western 




inlet, no outlet— Sides 1,000 feet high— Interesting lava for- 




Oregon 




mations-Fine trout fishing. 


Mesa Verde 


South 


77 


Most notable and best preserved prehistoric cliff dwellings in 


1906 


western 
Colorado 




United States, if not in the world. 


Piatt 


Southern 


1| 


Many sulphur and other springs possessing medicinal value, 
under Government regulation. 


1906 


Oklahoma 


Glacier 


North- 


1,.7>1 


Rugged moimtain region of unsurpassed Alpine character— 
250 glacier-fed lakes of romantic beauty— 60 small glaciers- 


1910 


western 






Montana 




Peaks of unusual shape— Precipices thousands of feet deep — 
Almost sensational scenery of marked individuality— Fine 
trout fishing. 


Rocky Mountain. 


North 


358 


Heart of the Rockies— Snowy range, peaks 11,000 to 14,250 feet 


1915 


middle 
Colorado 




altitude— Remarkable records of glacial period. 



National Parks of less popular interest are: 

Sullys Hill, 1904, North Dakota Wooded hilly tract on Devils Lake. 

Wind Cave, 1903, South Dakota Large natural cavern. 

Casa Grande Ruin, 1892, Arizona .'.... Prehistoric Indian ruin. 

2 

D. Qf.D. 
JUM IS" |9|g 



DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR 

OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY 



GLIMPSES OF OUR NATIONAL PARKS 

By Robert Sterling Yard 



I. 
CHARACTERISTICS 

THE national parks are areas which Congress has set apart, because 
of extraordinary scenic beauty, remarkable phenomena or other 
unusual qualification, for the use and enjoyment of the people for 
aU time. They are administered by the Department of the Interior. 

These are not parks in the common meaning of the word. Tliey are 
not beautiful tracts of cultivated country with smooth lawns and 
winding paths like Central Park in New York, or Lincoln Park in 
Chicago, or Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. They are, on the 
contrary, large areas which nature, not man, has made beautiful 
and which the hand of man alters only enough to provide roads to 
enter them, trails to penetrate their fastnesses, and hotels and camps 
to live in. 

There are fourteen national parks, of which eight are of the first 
order of size and scenic magnificence — which means a great deal in 
a land so beautiful as ours. Every person living in the United 
States ought to know much about these eight national parks and 
ought to visit them when possible, for, considered together, they con- 
tain more features of conspicuous grandeur than are readily accessi- 
ble in all the rest of the world together; while, considered individu- 
ally, there are few, if any, celebrated scenic places within easy reach 
abroad which are not equaled or excelled in America. Even the far- 
famed Swiss Alps are equaled, and, some travelers believe, excelled 
by the scenery of several of our own national parks. 

SCENERY OF THE FIRST ORDER 

We have said that in some respects American scenery is unequaled 
abroad. There are more geysers of large size in our Yellowstone 
National Park, for instance, than in all the rest of the world together, 
the nearest approach being the geyser fields of Iceland and far New 

3 



4 OUR NATTOlSrAL PARKS. 

Zealand. Again, it is conceded the world over that there is no valley in 
existence so strikingly beaiitifid as our Yosemite Valley, and nowhere 
else can be found a canyon of such size and exquisite coloring as our 
Grand Canyon of the Colorado. In the Sequoia National Park grow 
trees so huge and old that none quite compare with them. These are 
well-known facts with which every American ought to be familiar. 

Tlie eight national parks of the first order are the Mount Rainier 
National Park in Washington, the Crater Lake National Park in 
Oregon, the Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks in California, the 
Glacier National Park in Montana, the Yellowstone National Park, 
principally in Wyoming, and the Rocky Mountain and Mesa Verde 
National Parks in Colorado. With these must be classed the Grand 
Canyon of the Colorado in Arizona, which, though still remainmg a 
national monument, is one of the great wonders of the world. 

The principal difference between a national monument and a 
national park is that the former has merely been made safe from 
encroachment by private interests and enterprise, while the latter 
is also in process of development by roads and trails and hotels, so as 
to become a convenient resort for the people to visit and enjoy. 

EACH A PERSONALITY OF ITS OWN 

One of the striking and interesting features of the eight greater 
national parks of our country is that each one of them is quite dif- 
ferent from all the others ; each has a marked personahty of its owti. 

Momit Ramier, for instance, is an extmct volcano down the sides 
of which flow twenty-eight glaciers, or rivers of ice. 

Crater Lake fdls with water of astonishmg blue the hole left when 
the top of Moimt Mazama, another volcano in the same chain as 
Mount Rainier, was swallowed up in some far distant past. 

The Yosemite National Park, in addition to its celebrated Yo- 
semite Valley and lofty waterfalls, has in the north a river called 
the Tuolumne which spouts wheels of water fifty feet and more into 
the air. It has great areas of snow-topped mountains. 

The Sequoia National Park contains more than a million sequoia 
trees, of which 12,000 are more than ten feet in diameter, and some 
twice that and several from twenty-five to thirty-six feet through from 
side to side. Measure thirty-six feet on the sidewalk and see what 
that means. Some of these trees are older than human history. 

The Glacier National Park was made by the earth cracking in 
some far distant time and one side thrusting up and overlapping the 
other. It has cliffs several thousand feet high and more than sixty 
glaciers feed hundreds of lakes. One lake floats icebergs all summer. 
This scenery is truly Alpine. 

The Yellowstone National Park, beside its geysers, has many hot 
springs which build glistening plateaus of highly colored mmeral 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 5 

deposits. It has a canyon gorgeous with all the colors and shades 
of the rainbow, and it is literally the greatest wild animal preserve in 
the world. 

The Rocky Mountain National Park straddles the Continental 
Divide at a lofty height, with snow-capped mountams extending 
from end to end. Its glacier records are remarkable. 

The Mesa Verde National Park hides in its barren canyons the well- 
preserved ruins of a civilization which passed out of existence so 
many centmies ago that not even tradition recalls its people. 

It wiU be seen that one may visit a new national park each year 
for nearly a decade and see something quite new and remarkable at 
each visit. 

HOTELS AND CAMPS 

The map wiU show where these National parks arc located. They 
are aU upon lines of railways and are easily and comfortably reached 
from any part of the United States. Each of them is in charge of a 
resident supervisor who has under his charge enough park rangers 
to protect the forests from fhe, the wild animals from hunters, and 
the visitor from harm. There are good roads in aU of these parks, 
and hotels and public camps where visitors may stay as long as 
they like to enjoy the scenery and study nature. Trails are built 
to the waterfalls, up the highest mountains, and, in short, wherever 
especially fine views may be found. Over these trails visitors may 
walk or ride on horseback as they prefer. 

Many of the hotels are fine ones where every luxury may be had 
by those who insist upon luxuries even in the wilderness. There are 
often cheaper hotels also, and in the great public camps visitors may 
live very comfortably indeed and quite economically. One may go 
to these camps just as to a hotel, only he is assigned a comfortable 
tent instead of a room, and eats his meals at a big table in a big 
dining tent. There is another big tent, usually, to serve as a general 
living room. At night a camp fire is built in the woods, and all 
gather around it to sing and tell stories. It is great fun. Many 
persons who can easily afford the luxurious hotels live in the camps 
because they prefer doing so. 

The Department of the Interior, which has all the national parks 
in its care, is trying to make them popular and comfortable and avail- 
able for people of aU degrees of income. 

NATIONAL PARKS AND NATIONAL FOREST 

Not only should these parks be the best and most fully patronized 
health and pleasure resorts in the United States, but they should 
also become great centers of nature study. In the national parks 
only is nature most carefully conserved exactly as designed. No 



6 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

trees are cut clown for lumber, as in the national forests outside 
the parks, but arc allowed to reach their utmost size and age. No 
animals are killed except mountain lions and other predatory beasts 
which destroy the deer and young elk. No herds of sheep or cattle 
are permitted to destroy the beautiful carpeting of luxuriant grasses 
and gorgeous wild flowers in glades and valleys of noblest beauty. 
Here, then, the student and the lover of nature may study nature 
in her pristine beauty and under conditions which elsewhere exist 
only in the few remote lands not yet invaded by man. 

To these national parks, then, the Department of the Interior in- 
vites the student, amateur and professional alike. 

One must not confuse the national forests with the national parks. 
The national forests aggregate many times the area of the national 
parks. They were created to administer lumbering and grazing in- 
terests for the people; the lumbering, instead of being done by pri- 
vate interests for private profit, as in the past, is now done in the 
public interest. The trees are cut in accordance with the principles 
of scientific forestry, which conserves the smaller trees until they grow 
to a certain size, thus perpetuating the forests. Sheep or cattle 
graze in all pastures under governmental regulations, and regu- 
lated hunting is permitted in season. Tlie national parks, on the 
other hand, are not properties in even the least commercial sense, 
but natural preserves for the rest, recreation, and education of the 
people. They remain under nature's own chosen conditions. They 
alone maintain "the forest primeval." 

Lovers of sport also find their national parks rich fields of pleasure, 
provided they do their hunting only with the camera. This is en- 
couraged; and there are no other places in the world where wild 
animals may be approached so closely. In the Yellowstone, where 
shooting has been strictly prohibited since 1872, one may with rea- 
sonable care and precaution photograph deer at close quarters, ap- 
proach elk and antelope and even moose and bison near enough for 
good pictures, and occasionally coax bears even to take sugar from 
one's fingers. 

BIBDS AND WILD ANIMALS 

The lesson of the Yellowstone is that wild animals greatly fear man 
only when man is cruel and murderous. Another lesson from national 
parks experience is that no wild animal wiU injiu*e human beings 
except in self-defense. Even the grizzly bear, which we were brought 
up to believe an aggressive, ferocious animal, is found to be entirely 
shy and harmless except when violently assaulted. Tlie monster 
cat of our rock fastnesses — the mountain lion — big enough and pow- 
erful enough to drag down a full-grown elk, is the most timid of aU 
the beasts in the national parks, flying at great speed at the first sight 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 7 

or scent of man; but that again is because the mountain hon, being 
predatory, is the only animal in our national parks that is hmited. 
The national parks cover a great area, 4,665,966 acres in all. If 
all were put together it would mean an area of 7,290 square miles, as 
large, nearly, as the State of New Jersey. The Yellowstone National 
Park alone contains more than 3,300 square miles, and is as big as 
many of the independent European principalities that warred with 
each other for centuries before the genius of Bismarck united them 
into a great empire. 

GENERAL INFORMATION BULLETINS 

The following descriptions of some of our national parks are not 
intended to be exhaustive. In each, those characteristics are em- 
phasized which individualize the park, distinguishing it from others. 
Any person who wishes to know more about any national park than 
is here available, who wishes, for instance, to know the particular 
traveling and living facilities in each and the expenses of a visit 
thereto, should write to the Secretary of the Interior for the Gen- 
eral Information Bulletin of the particular national park in which 
he is interested. It will be sent free. 

II 
THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK 

Special Characteristic: Readable Records of Glacial Period 

rpHE Rocky Mountain National Park is in Colorado, about seventy 
-L miles by road or rail northwest of Denver. Find Longs Peak 
on a good map and you will have the center of the 360 square miles 
of snow-topped mountains which constitute the park. 

These mountains are part of the Continental Divide, which is the 
name given to the irregular line of highest land running north and 
south through North America which divides the waters flowing east- 
ward into the Atlantic Ocean from those flowing westward into the 
Pacific. For this reason the people of Colorado call their mountains 
the top of the world. They are scarcely that, for the Himalaya 
Mountains in Asia and the Andes in South America are, among others, 
much higher; but for the United States this picturesque figure of 
speech is sufficiently near the truth. 

This national park is certainly very high up in the air. The summer 
visitors who live at the base of the great mountains, principally at 
the beautiful eastern gateway, a little valley town of many hotels 
which is called Estes Park, are 8,000 feet, or more than a mile and 
a half, above the level of the sea ; while the mountains rise precipi- 



8 OUK NATIONAL PARKS. 

tously nearly a mile, and sometimes more than a mile, liigher still. 
Longs Peak, the biggest of them all, rises 14,255 feet above sea level, 
and most of the other mountains m the snowy range, as it is some- 
times called, are more than 12,000 feet high; several are nearly as 
high as Longs Peak. 

AT TIMBERLINE 

The valleys on both sides of this range and those which penetrate 
into its recesses are dotted with lovely park-like glades clothed in a 
profusion of glowing wild flowers and watered with cold streams from 
the mountain snows and glaciers. Forests of pine and silver-stemmed 
aspen separate them. Timber line, which is the name given to the 
limit to which trees can grow up the mountain sides, is more than 
11,000 feet above sea level, and up to that point the slopes are covered 
thick and close with spruce and fir, growing very straight and very tall. 

Just at tunberline, where the winter temperature and the fierce 
icy winds make it impossible for trees to grow tall, the spruces lie 
flat on the gi'ound like vines, and presently give place to low birches 
which in their turn give place to small piney growths and finally to 
tough stragglmg grass, hardy mosses, and tiny Alpine flowers. Grass 
grows in sheltered spots even on the highest peaks, which is fortunate 
for the large curve-horned mountain sheep which seek these high 
open places to escape their special enemies, the mountain lions. 

Even at the highest altitudes gorgeously colored wild flowers grow 
in glory and profusion in sheltered gorges. Even in late September 
large and beautiful columbines are found in the lee of protecting 
masses of snow banks and glaciers. 

Nowhere else are the timber-Hne struggles between the trees and 
the "wdnds more grotesquely exemplified and so easily accessible to 
tourists of average climbing ability. The first sight of luxuriant 
Engehnann spruces creeping closely upon the ground instead of 
rising a hundred and fifty feet or more straight and true as masts 
arouses keenest interest. Many trees which defy the winter gales 
grow bent in haK cu'cles. Others starting straight in shelter of 
some large rock bend at right angles where they emerge above the 
rock. Others which have succeeded in lifting their heads in spite of 
the winds have not succeeded in growing branches in any direction 
except in the lee of their trunks, and suggest big evergreen dust 
brushes rather than spruces and firs. 

Still others which have fought the wmters' gales for years are 
twisted and gnarled beyond description — like dwarfs and gnomes of 
an arboreal fairyland. StiU others growing m thick groups have 
found strength in union and form low stunted groves covered with 
thick roofs of matted branches bent over by the winds and so inter- 
twined that one can scarcely see daylight overhead — excellent shelter 
for man or animal overtaken by mountain-top storms. 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 9 

These familiar sights of timber line are wonderfully picturesque and 
interesting. They never lose their charm, however often seen. 

Above timber Ime the bare mountain masses rise from 1,000 to 
3,000 feet, often in sheer precipices. Covered with snow in fall, 
winter, and spring, and plentifully spattered with snow all summer 
long, the vast, bare granite masses, from which in fact the Rocky 
Mountains got their name, are beautiful beyond description. They 
are rosy at sunrise and sunset. During fair and sunny days they 
show all shades of translucent grays and mauves and blues. In 
some lights they are almost fairylike in then- exquisite delicacy. 
But on stormy days they are cold and dark and forbidding, burying 
their heads in gloomy clouds, from which sometimes they emerge 
covered with snow. 

WHERE STORMS ARE CRADLED 

Often one can see a thunderstorm born on the square granite 
head of Longs Peak. First, out of the blue sky a slight mist seems 
to gather. In a few moments, while you watch, it becomes a tiny 
cloud. This grows with great rapidity. In five minutes, perhaps, 
the mountain top is hidden. Then, out of nothing apparently, the 
cloud swells and sweeps over the sky. Sometimes in fifteen minutes 
after the first tiny fleck of mist appears it is raining in the valley and 
possibly snowing on the mountain. In half an hour more it has 
cleared. 

Standing on the summits of these mountams the climber is often 
enveloped in these brief-lived clouds. It is an impressive experience 
to look down upon the top of an ocean of cloud from which the 
greater peaks emerge at intervals. Sometimes the sun is shining on 
the observer upon the heights while it is raining in the valleys below. 
It is starthng to see lightning below you. 

ACCESSIBILITY 

One of the striking features of the Rocky Mountam National Park 
is the easy accessibility of these mountam tops. One may mount 
a horse after early breakfast in the valley, ride up Flattop to enjoy 
one of the great views of the world, and be back for late luncheon. 
The hardy foot traveler may make better time than the horse on 
these mountam trails. One may cross the Continental Divide from 
the hotels of one side to the hotels of the other between early break- 
fast and late dinner. 

In fact, for all-around accessibility there surely is no high mountain 
resort of the first order that wiH quite compare with the Rocky Moun- 
tain National Park. Three radroads to Denver skirt its sides, and 
Denver is only thirty hours from Chicago. 
17849°— 16 2 



10 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

This range was once a famous hunting ground for large game. 
Lord Dunraven, the famous Enghsh sportsman, visited it yearly to 
shoot its deer, bear, and bighorn sheep, and once he tried to buy it 
for a private game preserve. Now that the Government has made 
it a national park the protection offered its wild animals will make 
it, in a few years, one of the most successful wild-animal refuges in 
the world. 

These lofty rocks are the natural home of the celebrated Rocky 
Mountain sheep, or bighorn. This animal is much larger than any 
domestic sheep. It is powerful and wonderfully agile. When flying 
from enemies, these sheep, even the lambs, think nothing of dropping 
head downward off precipices hundreds of feet high. They do not 
land on their curved horns, as many persons believe, but upon their 
four feet held close together. Striking some ledge which breaks their 
fall, they immediately plunge again downward to another ledge, and 
so on till they reach good footing in the valley below. They also 
ascend slopes surprisingly steep. 

They are more agUe even than the celebrated chamois of the 
Swiss Alps, and are larger, more powerful, and much handsomer. 
It is something not to be forgotten to see a flock of a dozen or twenty 
mountain sheep making their way along the blown-out volcanic crater 
of Specimen Mountain iii the Rocky Mountaia National Park, 

LONGS PEAK AND THE GLACIER RECORDS 

The prominent central feature of the Rocky Mountain National 
Park is Longs Peak. It rears a square-cornered boxlike head well 
above the tumbled sea of surrounding mountahi tops. It has, unlike 
most great mountains, a distinct architectural form. Standmg well 
to the east of the range at about its center, it suggests the captain of 
a white-helmeted company, the giant leader of a giant band. It is 
supported on four sides by mountain buttresses, suggesting the stone 
buttresses of a central cathedral spire. From every side it looks the 
same, yet remarkably different. One does not know Longs Peak 
until he has seen it from every side, and then it becomes to him not 
a momitam mass but an architectural creation. 

For many years Longs Peak was considered unclimbable. But at 
last a way was found through an opening in perpendicular rocks 
called, from its shape, the Keyhole, out upon a steep slope leading 
from near its summit far down to a precipice upon its west side. 
The east side of Longs Peak is a nearly sheer precipice almost 2,000 
feet from the extreme top down, to Chasm Lake, which was the start- 
ing point of a gigantic glacier in times long before man. Chasm 
Lake, which is not difhcidt to reach from the valley, is one of the 
wildest lakes in natui'e. It is frozen eleven months of the year. 

There is no other region in America where glacial records of such 
prominence are so numerous and so easily reached and studied as in 



OUE NATIONAL PARKS. 11 

the Rocky Mountain national parks. The whole country has been 
fantastically cut and carved by gigantic glaciers of the prehistoric 
past. Their ancient beds, now grown with forests, their huge 
moraines, their cirques, or starting places, are, next to the vast 
mountains themselves, the most prominent features of the region. 

In fact these records of the period when this continent was planed 
and carved by the ice are so clearly, so simply, written in the rocks 
of this region that the whole story lies plain to the most casual eye. 

III. 
THE MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK 

Special Characteristic: Prehistoric CUff DweDings 

WHERE did the Indians come from ? That is one of the innumer- 
able questions which anthropologists have not yet solved. 
Some suggest that they came from Asia by way of Alaska because 
the Eskimo seem to somewhat resemble Mongolians. Others think 
they came from Europe by way of Greenland; others that they came 
from the South Sea islands by way of South America. 

Perhaps all these theorists are right. In one thing only do they 
agree and that is that, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, no matter 
what their tribal or other differences due to varying conditions of 
chmate and surroundings, all American Indians are of one physical 
type with similar mental characteristics and cultural tendencies. 

Their highest civilization undoubtedly developed m Peru, Central 
America, and southern Mexico, where architectural ruins of quite 
astonishing beauty are to-day crumbhng under the jungle. This 
civilization was rutlilessly destroyed by the Spanish conquest follow- 
ing the discovery of America. 

The next highest prehistoric civilization was in our owti southwest, 
and the remains of its highest special development are the chff 
dweUuigs of the Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado, to preserve 
which Congress has set apart the Mesa Verde National Park. 

When one speaks of the Pueblo Indians he does not mean an Indian 
stock or tribe, but merely Indians, possibly of various stocks and 
many tribes, who used to live, and a few of whose modern descendants 
still live, in pueblos or community houses of many rooms holding 
entire tribes or villages under one roof. The builders of Mesa Verde's 
prehistoric dwellings were of the Pueblo type. 

BTJUROWING INTO THE MESAS 

Those who have traveled through our southwestern states have seen 
from the car window mnumerable mesas or small isolated plateaus 
rising abruptly, for hundreds of feet, from the bare and often arid 



12 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

plains. The word mesa is Spanish for table, and indeed many of these 
mesas when seen at a distance may suggest to the imaginative mind 
tables with cloths reaching to the floor. 

Once the level of these mesa tops was the level of all of this vast 
southwestern country, but the rains and floods of centuries have 
washed away all the softer earth down to its present level leaving 
standing only the rocky spots or those so covered with surface rocks 
that the rains could not reach the softer gravel underneath. 

All have heard of the Enchanted Mesa in New Mexico which the 
Indians of recent times considered sacred. The Mesa Verde, or green 
mesa (because it is covered with stunted cedar and pinyon trees in a 
land where trees are few) is the next most widely known. 

The Mesa Verde is one of the largest mesas. It is fifteen miles 
long and eight miles wide. At its foot are masses of broken rocks 
rising from 300 to 500 feet above the bare plains. These are called 
the talus. Above the talus yellow sandstone walls rise precipitously 
two or three hundred feet higher to the mesa's top. 

It stands on the right bank of the Mancos River, down to which 
a number of small, rough canyons, once beds of streams, slope from 
the top of the mesa. It is in the sides of these small canyons where 
the most wonderful and best preserved cliff dwellings in America, if 
not in the world, are found to-day. 

LIVING HARD IN PREHISTORIC TIMES 

In prehistoric times a large human population lived in these cliff 
dwellings, seeking a home there for protection. They obtained their 
livelihood by agriculture on the forbidding tops of the mesa, culti- 
vating scanty farms, which yielded them a small crop of corn. 

Life must have been hard in this dry comitry, when the Mesa 
Verde commmiities flourished in the sides of these sandstone cliffs. 
Game was scarce and hmiting arduous. The Mancos yielded a few 
fishes. The earth contributed berries or nuts. At that time, as at 
present, water was rare, and fomid only in sequestered places near 
the heads of the canyons, but notwithstanding these difficulties the 
inhabitants cultivated their farms and raised their corn, which they 
ground on flat stones called metates, and baked their bread on a flat 
stone griddle. They boiled their meat in well-made vessels, some of 
which were artistically decorated. 

Their life was hard, but so confidently did they believe that they 
were dependent upon the gods to make the rain fall and the corn 
grow that they were a religious people who worshipped the sun as 
the father of all, and the earth as the mother who brought them aU 
their material blessings. They possessed no written language, and 
could only record their thoughts by a few symbols which they painted 



OUR NATIOKAL PARKS. 13 

on their earthenware jars or scratched on the sides of the chffs adjoin- 
ing their habitations. 

As their sense of beauty was keen, their art, though primitive, was 
true ; rarely reahstic, generally symbolic. Their decoration of cotton 
fabrics and ceramic work might be called beautiful, even when judged 
by the highly developed taste of to-day. They fashioned axes, spear 
points, and rude tools of stone; they wove sandals and made attrac- 
tive basketry. 

They were not content with rude buildings, and had long outgrown 
caves or earth homes that satisfied less civilized Indians farther north 
and south of them. They shaped stones into regular forms, orna- 
mented them with designs and laid them one on another. Their 
masonry resisted the destructive forces of centuries of rain and snow 
beating upon them. 

DISCOVERY OF SUN TEMPLE 

The Mesa Verde tribes probably had little culture when they first 
climbed these precipitous rocks and found shelter, like animals, in 
the natural caves under the overhanging floor of the mesa. These 
caves were shelters not only from the storm of winter and the burning 
sun of summer, but from rapacious human enemies as well; for there 
are evidences of warfare among the prehistoric tribes of our south- 
west lands. 

But with the generations, perhaps the centuries, they made rapid 
strides. Ladders were substituted for zigzag trails, making their 
retreats more inaccessible, adobe supplemented caves, brick and stone 
succeeded adobe, culture succeeded savagery. 

A great mound on the top of the mesa which Dr. Fewkes unearthed 
in the summer of 1915 shows that, probably about 1300 A. D. they had 
begim to emerge from the caves to build upon the surface, still a fur- 
ther advance in civilization. It is significant that this building is 
partially sculptured and architecturally ambitious. It is still more 
significant that it was not a house for temporal needs nor a fortress 
for warfare, but a religious structure. It was a temple to their god, 
the sun. 

The remains of this advanced civilization, of quality so greatly 
beyond its neighbors, may be seen and studied by all who choose to 
visit the Mesa Verde National Park. It is an experience full of 
interest and pleasm'e. There are many canyons, and many ruins 
in each canyon. There are ruins yet unexplored. There are several 
mounds, like that under which Sun Temple was discovered, yet un- 
earthed. The visitor may enter these ruins and examine many of the 
articles which were found in them. 



-^^ OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

Two herdsmen, Richard and Alfred WetheriU, whUe hunting lost 
cattle one December day in 1888, discovered these ruins. Commg 
to the edge of a smaU canyon, they saw under the overreachmg cliiis 
of the opposite side, apparently hanging above a great precipice, 
what they thought was a city with towers and walls. They were 
astonished beyond measure— and mdeed even the expectant visitor 
of to-day mvoluntarily exclauns over the surprise and beauty of the 
spectacle. 

EXPLORATION OF THE MESA VERDE 

Later they explored it and caUed it CW Palace— an unfortunate 
name, for it was not a palace at aU, but a viUage with two hundred 
rooms for family living and with twenty-two kivas, or sacred rooms, 
for worship. Later on they found another shnilar community 
dweUing which once sheltered 350 mhabitants. This they caUed 
Spruce Tree House because a large spruce tree grew near it. These 
names have remained. 

Other explorers followed and many other ruins were found. This 
is not the place to name or describe them, but it may be said that here 
may be seen the oldest and most fully realized civic-center scheme m 
America. City plannmg of which we hear so much now, as if it were 
a new idea, began in America five or six centuries ago under the cliffs 
of the Mesa Verde. 

Antiquities are not the only attractions m the Mesa Verde National 
Park. Its natural beauties should not be overlooked. In winter it 
is wholly inaccessible on account of the deep snows; m some months 
it is dry and parched, but in June and July when rains come vegeta- 
tion is in full bloom, the plants flower and the grass grows high in 
the glades; the trees put forth their new green leaves. The Mesa 
Verde is attractive in all seasons of the year and full oi interest for 
those who love the unusual and picturesque of mountain scenery. 

IV. 

THE YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK 

Special Characteristics: Glaciers and Hot Springs; Wonderfully Colored 
Canyon; Largest Wild Bird and Animal Refuge 

THE Yellowstone National Park, which hes principally m Wyoming, 
is the most widely celebrated of all our national parks because 
it contams more and greater geysers than aU the rest of the world 
together. Tlie geyser fields next in size are in Iceland and New 
Zealand. The rest are inconspicuous. 

Geysers are, roughly speaking, water volcanoes. They occur only 
at places where the internal heat of the earth approaches close to 
the surface. Then- action, for so many years unexplained, and even 



OUR NATIONAL PAEKS. 15 

now regarded with wonder by so many, is simple. Water from the 
surface trickling through cracks in the rocks, or water from subter- 
ranean springs collecting in the bottom of the geyser's crater, down 
among the strata of intense heat, becomes itself intensely heated and 
gives off steam, which expands and forces upward the cooler water 
that lies above it. 

It is then that the water at the surface of the geyser begins to bub- 
ble and give off clouds of steam, the sign to the watchers above that 
the geyser is about to play. 

At last the water in the bottom reaches so great an expansion 
under continued heat that the less heated water above can no longer 
weigh it down, so it bursts upward with great violence, rising many 
feet in the air and continuing to play until practically all the water 
in the crater has been expelled. The water, cooled and falling back 
to the ground, again seeps tlirough the surface to gather as before in 
the crater's depth, and in a greater or less time, according to diffi- 
culties in the way of its return, becomes reheated to the bursting 
point, when the geyser spouts again. 

One may make a geyser with a test tube and a Bunsen burner. 

THE HOT WATER PHENOMENA 

Nearly the entire Yellowstone region, covering an area of about 
3,300 square miles, is remarkable for its hot-water phenomena. The 
geysers are confined to three basins lying near each other in the 
middle west side of the park, but other hot water manifestations 
occur at more mdely separated points. Marvelously colored hot 
springs, mud volcanoes, and other strange phenomena are frequent. 
At Mammoth, at Norris, and at Thumb the hot water has brought 
to the surface quantities of white mineral deposits which build 
terraces of beautifully incrusted basins high up into the air, often 
engulfing trees of considerable size. Over the edges of these carved 
basins pours the hot water. Microscopic plants called algas grow on 
the edges and sides of these basins, assisting the deposition of the 
mineral matter and painting them hues of red and pink and bluish 
gray, which in warm weather glow brilliantly, but in cold weather 
almost disappear. At many other points lesser hot springs occur, 
introducing strange, almost uncanny, elements into wooded and 
otherwise quite normal landscapes. 

A tour of these hot-water formations and spouting geysers is an 
experience never to be forgotten. Some of the geysers play at quite 
regular intervals. For many years the celebrated Old Faitlif ul played 
with great regularity every seventy minutes, but during the smnmer 
of 1915 the interval lengthened to about eighty-five minutes, due, it 
is supposed, to the smaller snowfall and consequent lessened water 
supply of the preceding winter. Some of the largest geysers play at 



16 OUR nawonal parks. 

irregular intervals of days, weeks, or months. Some very small ones 
play every few minutes. Many bubbling hot springs, which throw 
water two or three feet into the air once or twice a minute, are really 
small, imperfectly formed geysers. 

The hot-spring terraces are also a rather awe-inspiring spectacle 
when seen for the first time. The visitor may climb upon them and 
pick his way around among the steaming pools. In certain lights 
the surface of these pools appears vividly colored. The deeper hot 
pools are often intensely green. The incrustations are often beauti- 
fully crystallized. Clumps of grass, and even flowers, which have 
been submerged in the charged waters become exquisitely plated, as 
if with frosted silver. 

But the geysers and hot-water formations are by no means the 
only wonders in the Yellowstone. Indeed the entire park is a 
wonderland. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone affords a 
spectacle worthy of a national park were there no geysers. But you 
must not confuse your Grand Canyons, of which there are several in 
our wonderful western country. Of these, by far the largest and 
most impressive is the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, in 
Arizona. Tliat is the one always meant when people speak of visiting 
*'the Grand Canyon," without designating a location. It is the 
giant of canyons. 

GRAND CANYON OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is altogether different. 
Great though its size, it is much the smaller of the two. What makes 
it a scenic feature of the first order is its marvelously variegated 
coloring. It is the cameo of canyons. 

Standing upon Inspiration Point, which pushes out almost to the 
center of the canyon, one seems to look almost vertically down upon 
the foaming Yellowstone River. To the south a waterfall twice the 
height of Niagara rushes seemingly out of the pine-clad hills and 
pours downward to be lost again in green. 

From that point two or three miles to where you stand and be- 
neath you widens out the most glorious kaleidoscope of color you 
will ever see in nature. The steep slopes dropping on either side 
a thousand feet and more from the pine-topped levels above are 
inconceivably carved and fretted by the frost and the erosion of the 
ages. Sometimes they lie in straight lines at easy angles, from which 
jut high rocky prominences. Sometimes they lie in huge hoUows 
carved from the side walls. Here and there jagged rocky needles 
rise perpendicularly for hundreds of feet like groups of gothic spires. 

And the whole is colored as brokenly and vividly as the field of a 
kaleidoscope. The whole is streaked and spotted and stratified in 
every shade from the deepest orange to the faintest lemon, from deep 



. OUR NATIONAL PAEKS. 17 

crimson tlirougli all the brick shades to the softest pink, from black 
through all the grays and 23earls to ghstening white. The greens are 
furnished by the dark pmes above, the lighter shades of growth 
caught here and there in soft masses on the gentler slopes and the 
foaming green of the plunging river so far below. The blues, ever 
changing, are foimd in the dome of the sky overhead. 

It is a spectacle which one looks upon m silence. 

There are several spots from which fine partial views may be had, 
but no person can say he has seen the canyon who has not stood upon 
Inspiration Point. Remember this when you visit the Yellowstone. 

WILD ANIMALS LIVING NATURALLY 

Another interesting feature of the Yellowstone National Park is its 
wild animal life. It is the largest and most successful preserve in the 
world. Its 3,300 square miles of mountains and vaUeys remain 
nearly as nature made them, for the two hundred miles of roads and 
the seven hotels and many camps are as nothing in this immense 
wilderness. No tree has been cut except when absolutely necessary 
for road or trail or camp. No herds invade its valleys. No rifle has 
been fired except by an occasional poacher along the bordei-s since 
the park was estabhshed in 1872. 

Visitors for the most part keep to the beaten road, and the wild 
animals have learned in the years that they mean them no harm. 
To be sure they are seldom seen by the people filling the long trains 
of stages which travel from point to point daily during the season; 
but the quiet watcher on the trails may see deer and bear and elk 
and antelope to his heart's content, and he may even see mountain 
sheep, moose, and bison by journeying on foot or by horseback into 
their distant retreats. In the faU and spring when the crowds are 
absent, wild deer gather in great numbers at the hotel clearings to 
crop the grass, and the officers' children feed them flowers. One of 
the diversions at the road builders' camps in the wilderness is cul- 
tivating the acquaintance of the animals. There are photographs 
in the War Department at Washmgton of men feeding sugar to bear 
cubs while mother bear looks idly on at a distance. 

Thus one of the most interesting lessons from the Yellowstone is 
that wild animals are fearful and dangerous only when men treat 
them as game or as enemies. 

BEARS, ELK, MOOSE, DEER, ANTELOPE, AND BISON 

Even the big grizzlies which are generally believed to be ferocious 
are proved by our national parks experience to be entirely inoffensive 
if not attacked. Even when attacked they make every possible 
effort to escape, and only turn upon men when finally di-iven into 

17849°— 16 3 



18 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. • 

some place from which they can not get away. Then only are they 
dangerous, and then they are dangerous indeed. 

The grizzly bear, by the way, is one of the shyest of wild animals, 
and may be seen only with difliculty. It lives principally on roots, 
berries, nuts, and honey^ — when honey may be had. It can not climb 
trees like the brown boars. Its little ones are born in caves where 
bears hibernate through the winters and are little larger than squirrels 
when they first come into the world. 

The brown, cinnamon, and black bears, which, by the way, are the 
same species only differently colored — the blondes and brunettes, so 
to speak, of the same bear family — are quite different. They are 
playful, comparatively fearless, sometimes even friendly. They are 
greedy fellows, and steal camp supplies whenever they can. The 
large meat wagons which carry supplies to the distant hotels and 
camps over night are equipped with iron covers, because the bears 
used to rip off the wooden tops during the resting times and run off 
with sides of beef and mutton. One night several ^'cars ago teamsters 
drove three bears from the top of a single one of these big wagons. 

This wild animal paradise contains thirty thousand elk, several 
thousand moose, innumerable deer, many antelope, and a large and 
increasing herd of wild bison. 

It is an excellent bird preserve also; more than 150 species live 
natural, undisturbed lives. Eagles abound among the crags. Wild 
geese and ducks are found in profusion. Many thousands of large 
white pelicans add to the picturesqueness of Yellowstone Lake. 

The Yellowstone also contains a petrified forest of prehistoric trees 
which is unexcelled in America. 

DISCOVERY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

The first recorded visit to the Yellowstone was made by John 
Colter in 1810. He was a trapper and adventurer who took refuge 
there from hostile Indians. His story of its wonders was discredited. 

The next recorded visit was by a trapper named Joseph Meek in 
1829, who described it as " a country smoking with vapor from boiling 
springs and burning with gases issuing from small craters." From 
some of these craters, he said, "issued blue flame and molten brim- 
stone," which, of course, was not true, though doubtless Meek fully 
believed it to be the truth. 

Between 1830 and 1840, Warren Angus Ferris, a clerk in the 
American Fur Co., wrote the first description of the Firehole Geyser 
Basin, but it was not until 1852 that the geyser district was actually 
defined, and the geysers precisely located. This was done by Father 
De Smet, the famous Jesuit missionary. 

It remained for a Government expedition, sent out in 1859 under 
command of Capt. W. F. Reynolds, to first really explore and chart 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 19 

the region. Several private explorers followed, but so great was 
public incredulity as to the marvels they described that they did not 
dare tell their experiences befoi'e any general audiences. The large 
exploring expedition under Governor Henry D. Washburn, surveyor 
general of Montana, in 1870, finally established the facts to the public 
belief and led to the creation of the Yellowstone National Pai-k. 

V. 

THE GLACIER NATIONAL PARK 

Special Characteristics: Unsurpassed Alpine Scenery; 250 Lakes of 

Particular Beauty 

nnHE Glacier National Park is so named because in the hollow 
■^ of its rugged mountain tops lie more than sixty glaciers. It is 
in northwestern ]\Iontana right up against the Canadian boundary 
line, from which, on the map, it appears to hang down like a boy's 
pocket full of the sort of thmgs boys usually carry there. It is a 
land of peaks and precipices, snow, ice, rushing rivers, waterfalls, 
and lakes of great loveliness. Experienced travelers tell us that 
nowhere in the world is alpine beauty found in such diversity and 
luxuriance. It contams 1,534 square miles. 

A glacier is a river of ice, remarkably like a river of water in its 
action, only, of course, much slower. The glacier begins in a pocket 
or cirque of snow instead of in a lake or spring, as does a river. 

Like the river, it flows through valleys, the ice becoming harder 
under the pressure from above. It grows in size by smaller glaciers 
flowing into it. It breaks into ripples of ice while flowing over rocky 
ledges, and, also like rivers, forms falls when dropping over precipices. 

The glacier ends when it reaches far enough down the mountain 
sides for the v/armer weather to melt the ice into a river of water. 

But, with all its glaciers, the Glacier National Park is cliiefly re- 
markable for its picturesquely modeled peaks, the unique quality 
of its rugged mountain masses, its gigantic precipices, and the 
romantic loveliness of its lakes. Though all the other National 
Parks have these general features in addition to others which dif- 
ferentiate each from the other, the Glacier National Park possesses 
them in unusual abundance and especially happy combination. In 
fact the almost sensational massing of these scenic features is what 
gives it marked individuality. 

A ROMANCE OF GEOLOGY 

How Nature made this remarkable spot far back in the dim ages 
long before man is a stirring story. 

Once this whole region was covered with water, but whether the 
water was a lake or a part of the sea no man knows. The tiny earthy 



20 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

particles carried in this water, just as you see mud carried in a stream 
after a shower, deposited themselves gradually in layers on the bottom, 
continually lessening the water's depth. Geologists call these layers 
strata after they harden into rock. 

If you were in the Glacier National Park to-day you would see 
broad horizontal streaks of differently colored rock in the mountain 
masses thousands of feet above your head. These are the very strata 
that the waters deposited in its depths in those far away ages. 

But how did they get away up there in the air? The answer to 
that is the wonderful story. 

According to one famous theory of creation, the earth was once 
a great globe of gases, and it has contracted through unnumbered 
cycles of time to its present hard rocky seK. Well, in the times we 
speak of the earth was still contracting or growing smaller. Conse- 
quently its rocky crust contmually kept getting too big and, like the 
orange you are sucking, some part of it somewhere was always 
bulging and giving way. 

That is what must have happened where the Glacier National Park 
now is. The bottom of the lake or sea, under the enormous pressure 
agamst its sides and from below, gradually rose and became dry land. 

Then the land at this point, probably because it was pushed hard, 
by the contracting land masses on both sides of it, rose in long irregu- 
lar wavelike masses, forming mountams. Then, when the rock could 
no longer stand the awful strain, it cracked and one edge was thrust 
upward and over the other edge and settled into its present position. 

The edge that was thrust over the other was thousands of feet thick. 
It crumbled into peaks, precipices, and gorges. 

Upon these mountains and precipices the snows and the rains of 
uncounted centuries have since fallen, and the ice and the waters 
have worn and carved them into the area of distinguished beauty 
that is to-day the Glacier National Park, 

Think of this when you go there, and when you hear people speak 
of the Lewis Overthrust you will know what they mean. This range 
of the Rockies is called the Lewis Mountains. 

SCENES OF EXQUISITE BEAUTY 

To picture to yourselves this region, imagine a chain of very lofty 
mountains twisting about like a worm, spotted everywhere with snow 
fields and bearing ghstening glaciers in sixty or more huge hollows. 

Imagine these mountains crumbled and broken on their east sides 
into precipices sometimes three or four thousand feet deep and 
flanked everywhere by lesser peaks and tumbled mountain masses of 
smaller size in whose hollows lie the most beautiful lakes you have 
ever dreamed of. 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 21 

Imagine everywhere mountain gorges of the utmost wildness. 
Imagine rushing rivers and v/aterfaUs. Imagine valleys clothed with 
pines right up to timber line where trees can not grow because it is too 
high and in winter too cold and wmdy. 

Imagine what aU this looks like in summer, and then some summer 
go there yourseK and you will find that you did not imagine even a 
smaU part of its real beauty. 

Down from the Continental Divide, which the crest of the moun- 
tains is called because it divides the streams that flow eastward into 
the Atlantic Ocean from those that flow westward into the Pacific, 
descend nineteen principal valleys, seven on the east side and twelve 
on the west. Of course there are very many smaller valleys trib- 
utary to each of these larger valleys. Through these valleys run the 
rivers from the glaciers far up on the mountains. 

Many of these valleys have not yet been thoroughly explored. It 
is probable that some of them have never been even entered except 
by Indians; for there are Indians still living during the summers in 
the Glacier National Park. The great Blackfeet Indian Reservation, 
one of the many tracts of land set apart for the Indians still remain- 
ing in this country, adjoins the Glacier National Park on the west. 
Northward, the park adjoins the Waterton Lakes Park in Canada. 

There are 250 known lakes. Probably there are small ones in the 
wilder parts which white men have not yet even seen. 

PURCHASED FROM THE INDIANS 

This region was not visited by white men till 1853 when a Govern- 
ment engineer exploring for a route to the Pacific Ocean ascended one 
of the creeks by mistake and returned when he found that no rail- 
road could be built there. The next explorers were engineers who 
went in to establish the Canadian boundary line in 1861. 

'In 1890 copper was found at the head of Quartz Creek, and there 
was a rush of prospectors. In 1896 Congress bought the land east 
of the Continental Divide from the Blackfeet Indians, but not enough 
copper was found to pay for the mining. Since then few persons 
went there but big game hunters till 1910 when it was made a 
National Park. 

There are now several very fine hotels and several camps on the 
east side. Most of the tourists go there, but the west side is wonder- 
fully beautiful, too, and hotels and camps are found there also. 

There are a few good roads for automobiles and trails for walking 
and horseback riding. A railroad touches its southern boundary. 



22 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

VI 

THE MOUNT RAINIER NATIONAL PARK 
Special Characteristic: Complicated Glacial System Flowing from One Peak 

IN the northwestern corner of the United States rises, from the 
Cascade Mountains, a series of extinct volcanoes ice-clad from 
summit to foot the year around. Foremost among them, counting 
from south to north, are Mount Shasta in California; Mount Hood in 
Oregon; Mount St. Helens, Mount Adams, Mount Rainier and Mount 
Baker in Washington. Once, in the dim ages when America was 
making, they blazed across the sea like huge beacons. Today, their 
fires quenched, they suggest a stalwart band of Knights of the Ages, 
hclmeted in snow, armored in ice, standing at parade upon a carpet 
patterned gorgeously in wild flowers. 

Easily chief of this knightly band is Mount Rainier, a giant towering 
14,408 feet above tide water in Puget Sound. Home-bound sailors 
far at sea mend their courses from his silver summit. Travelers 
over land catch the sun glint from his shining sides at a distance of 
more than one hundred and fifty miles. His glorious snow-crowned 
dome is easily visible more than one hundred miles distant. 

This mountain has a glacier system far exceeding in size and im- 
pressive beauty that of any other in the United States. From its 
summit and cirques twenty-eight named rivers of ice pour slowly 
down its sides. There are others unnamed. Seen upon the map, as 
if from an aeroplane, one thinks of it as an enormous frozen octo- 
pus stretching icy tentacles down upon every side among the rich 
gardens of wild flowers and splendid forests of fir and cedars below. 

BIRTH OF THE GLACIERS 

Every winter the moisture-laden winds from the Pacific, suddenly 
cooled against its summit, deposit upon its top and sides enormous 
snows. These, settling in the mile-wide crater which was left after a 
great explosion in some prehistoric age carried away perhaps two 
thousand feet of the volcano's former height, press with overwhelming 
weight down the mountain's sloping sides. 

Thus are born the glaciers, for the snow under its own pressure 
quickly hardens into ice. Through fourteen valleys self-carved in 
the sohd rock flow these rivers of ice, now turning, as rivei-s of water 
turn, to avoid the harder rock strata, now roaring over precipices like 
congealed water falls, now rippling, like water currents, over rough 
bottoms, pushing, pouring relentlessly on until they reach those parts 
of their courses where warmer air turns them into rivers of water. 



OUR NATIOISTAL PARKS. 23 

There are forty-eight square miles of these glaciers, ranging in 
width from five hundred feet to a full mile and in thickness from fifty 
feet to many hundreds, perhaps oven more than a thousand feet. 

Moiuit Rainier is nearly three miles high, measured from sea level. 
It rises nearly two miles above its immediate base. Once it was a 
complete cone like the famous Fujiyama, the sacred mountain of 
Japan. Then it was probably 16,000 feet high. 

ONCE WAS 2,000 FEET HIGHER 

Indian legends teU of the great eruption which blew its top off. 
There have been slight eruptions within memory, one in 1843, one 
in 1854, one in 1858 and the last in 1870. Even now it is only dor- 
mant. Jets of steam melt fantastic holes in the snow and ice at its 
summit, and there are hot springs at its foot. But it is entirely safe 
to visit Mount Rainier. Further eruptions are unlikely and, in any 
event, would amply announce their coming. 

The National Park which incloses Mount Rainier is about eighteen 
miles square, containhig three hundred and twenty-four square miles. 
It is easily reached by railroad and automobile from neighboring cities. 
A new automobile road enables stages to bring visitors to beautiful 
Paradise Valley, whose flowered slopes are bordered by the great 
Nisqually, Paradise, and Stevens Glaciers. One may reach this point 
in four hours from Tacoma and return the same day. But it is a spot 
where the visitor may well spend weeks. 

The Nisqually Glacier is the most impressive though by no means the 
largest of the glaciers. It is five miles long and, at Paradise Valley, is 
half a mile wide. Glistening white and fairly smooth at its shining 
source on the mountain's summit, its surface here is soiled with dust 
and broken stone and squeezed and rent by terrible pressure into 
fantastic shapes. Innumerable crevasses, or cracks, many feet deep 
break across it, caused by the more rapid movement of the glacier's 
middle than its edges; for glaciere, again like rivers of water, de- 
velop swifter currents nearer mid-stream. 

Professor Le Conte tells us that the movement of Nisqually Glacier 
in summer averages, at mid-stream, about sixteen inches a day. It 
is far less at the margins, its speed being retarded by the friction of 
the sides. 

It is one of the great pleasures of a visit to Mount Rainier National 
Park to wander over the fields of snow and climb out on the Nisqually 
Glacier and explore its crevasses and ice caves. 

Like all glaciers, the Nisqually gathers on its surface masses of 
rock with which it strews its sides just as rivers of water strew their 
banks with logs and floating debris. These are called lateral moraines, 
or side moraines. Sometimes glaciers build lateral moraines miles 



24 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

long and over a thousand feet high, as you will see when you visit 
the Rocky Mountain National Park. 

The rocks which are carried in mid-stream to the end of the glacier 
and dropped when the ice melts are called the medial or middle 
moraine. 

The end, or snout, of the glacier thus always lies among a great 
mass of rocks and stones. The Nisqually River flows from a cave in 
the end of the Nisqually Glacier's snout, for the melting begins miles 
up stream under the glacier. The river is milky wbite when it first 
appears because it carries sediment and powdered rock, which, how- 
ever, it soon deposits, becoming quite clear. 

There are many glaciers as large and larger than the Nisqually 
but they are little known because so hard to reach. When the 
Department of the Interior opens roads to the other sides and a road 
all around the great ice mountam all of these will become easily 
accessible to visitors. 

CREATURES LIVING IN THE ICE 

Many interesting things might be told of these glaciers were there 
space. For example, several species of minute insects live in the 
ice, hopping about like tiny fleas. They are harder to see than the 
so-called sand fleas at the sea shore because much smaller. Slender, 
dark brown worms live in countless millions in the surface ice. Mi- 
croscopic rose-colored plants also tlu-ive in such great numbers that 
they tint the surface here and there, making what is commonly called 
"red snow." 

But this brief picture of the Mount Rainier National Park would 
miss its loveliest touch without some notice of the wild flower parks 
lying at the base, and often reaching far up between the icy fuigers, of 
Mount Rainier. Paradise Valley, Henrys Hunting Ground, Spray 
Park, Summerland — such are the names given to some of these 
beauty spots. 

Let John Muir, the celebrated naturalist, describe them here, 

"Above the forests," he writes, "there is a zone of the loveliest 
flowers, fifty miles in circuit and nearly two miles wide, so closely 
planted and luxurious that it seems as if nature, glad to make an 
open space between woods so dense and ice so deep, were econo- 
mizing the precious ground and trying to see how many of her dar- 
lings she can get together in one mountain wi'eath — daisies, anemones, 
columbme, erytlii'oniums, larkspurs, etc., among which we wade 
knee-deep and waist-deep, the bright corollas in myriads touching 
petal to petal. Altogether this is the richest subalpme garden I have 
ever found, a perfect flower elysium." 



OUE NATIONAL PARKS. 25 

VII 

THE CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK 

Special Characteristic: Lake of Great Depth Filling Collapsed Volcanic 

Crater 

IN the heart of the Cascade Mountains of our Northwest, whose 
volcanoes were m constant eruption in the ages before history, 
and now, extinct and ice-plated, shine like huge diamonds in the 
sunlight, there lies, jewel-like in a setting of lava, a lake of unbe- 
lievable blue. The visitor who comes suddenly upon it stands silent 
with emotion, overcome by its quite extraordinary beauty and by a 
strange sense of mystery which even the unimaginative feel keenly 
and which increases rather than decreases with famiUarity. 

This is Crater Lake. 

One of the very largest of these ancient volcanoes was Mount 
Mazama. It stood in the southern central part of what is now Ore- 
gon, two hundred miles south of Mount Rainier and nearly as lofty. 
It was about the height of Mount Shasta, in plain sight of which 
it rose nearly a hundred miles to its north. 

But this was ages ago. No human eyes ever saw Mount Mazama. 
Long before man came, the entire upper part of it in some titanic 
cataclysm fell in upon itself as if swallowed by a subterranean cavern, 
leaving its crater-like lava sides cut sharply downward into the 
central abyss. 

What a spectacle that must have been! 

The first awful depth of this vast hole no man can guess. But the 
volcano was not quenched; it burst up through the collapsed lavas 
in three places, making lesser cones within the greater, but none 
quite so high as the surrounding rim. 

Then the fires ceased and gradually, as the years passed, springs 
percolated into the vast basin and filled it with water within a thou- 
sand feet of its rim. As you see it to-day one of these cones emerges 
a few hundred feet from the surface. The lake is 2,000 feet deep in 
places. It has no inlet of any sort nor is there any stream running 
out of it; but the water is supposed to escape by underground chan- 
nels and to reappear in the Klamath River, a few miles away. 

ROMANTIC INDIAN LEGENDS 

The Indians beheved that Crater Lake was the home of a great 
spirit whom they called Llao. The blue waters teemed with giant 
crawfish, his servants, some of them so large that they could reach 
great claws to the top of the cliffs and seize venturesome visitors. 
Another great spirit chieftain, whom they called SkeU, was supposed 



26 OUR ISTATIONAL PARKS. 

to live in the Klamath Marsh near by and to have many servants 
who could take at will the forms of eagles and antelopes. 

War broke out, so the Indian legend says, between Llao and Skell 
and Skell was captured. The monsters from the lake tore out his 
heart and played ball with it, tossing it back and forth from mountain 
top to mountain top. But it was caught in the air by one of Skell's 
eagles and by him passed to one of SkeU's antelopes, and by him 
passed to others who finally escaped with it. 

Shell's body miraculously grew again around his heart and, in 
time, he captured Llao, and tore his body into fragments which he 
tossed into the lake. The giant crawfish, thinking them fragments 
of Shell's body, devoured them greedily. But when, last of all, Llao's 
head was thrown in, the monsters recognized it and would not eat it. 

The remains of Llao's head remain to-day sticking out of the 
water of Crater Lake. Some Indians still look upon it with awe, but 
scientists recognize it as the little cone described above. Its name 
is Wizard Island. 

Another legend describes the strength-giving power of the water. 
A band of Klamath Indians came unexpectedly upon the rim and 
ran away m terror. But one, braver than the others, remained to 
gaze upon its beauty. He lit a camp fire and slept. 

Again and again he returned. One day he ventured to the water's 
edge. After many moons he dared even to bathe in the lake, and 
was filled with great strength. He told his tribe, and, after many 
moons, others came and bathed and were strengthened. Then aU 
the tribe bathed in the waters and became wonderfully strong. 

But finally Llao had his revenge. His monsters siezed the brave 
who first ventured, bore him to the highest part of the rim and tore 
his body into small pieces. The spot where this was done is to-day 
called Llao Rock, 

PHANTOM SHIP AND WIZARD ISLAND. 

Crater Lake is one of the most beautiful spots in America. The 
gray lava run is remarkably sculptured. The water is remarkably 
blue, a lovely turquoise along the edges, and, in the deep parts, seen 
from above, extremely dark. The contrast on a sunny day between 
the unreal, fairylike rim across the lake and the fantastic sculptures at 
one's feet, and, in the lake between, the myriad gradations from 
faintest turquoise to deepest Prussian blue, dwells long in the memory. 

Unforgettable, also, are the twisted and contorted lava formations 
of the inner rim. A boat ride along the edge of the lake reveals these 
in a thousand changes. At one point near shore a mass of curiously 
carved lava is called the Phantom Ship because, seen at a distance, 
it suggests a ship under full sail. The illusion at dusk or by moon- 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 27 

light is striking. In certain slants of light, the Phantom Ship sud- 
denly disappears — a phantom indeed. 

Another experience full of interest is a visit to Wizard Island. One 
can climb its sides and descend into its little crater. 

Geologists find Crater Lake of special interest because of the way 
nature made it. Many volcanoes have had their tops blown off. 
Mount Rainier was one of these. But no other in the United States 
has fallen in, like Mount Mazama. 

The evidence of this process is quite conclusive. The lava found 
on the slopes that remain was not blown there from an exploding 
summit, but ran, hot and fluid, from a crater many thousands of feet 
higher. The pitch of these outer slopes enables the scientist to tell 
with reasonable probability how high the volcano originally was. 

VIII. 

THE YO SEMITE NATIONAL PARK. 

Special Characteristics: Sensationally Beautiful Valley and Spectacular 

Waterfalls 

THE Yosemite National Park lies near the crest of the Sierra 
Nevadas in western central California. Its 1,100 square miles 
contain scenic features of beauty so unusual and variety so wide 
that adequate description reads like romance. 

The famous Yosemite Valley is a small part of this extraordinary 
holiday garden — a mere crack in its granite mountams seven mdes 
long by less than a mile wide. 

For the rest, the park includes, in John Muir's words, ''the head- 
waters of the Tuolumne and Merced Rivers, two of the most songful 
streams in the world; innumerable lakes and waterfalls and smooth 
silky lawns ; the noblest forests, the loftiest granite domes, the deepest 
ice-sculptured canyons, the brightest crystalline pavements, and 
snowy mountains soaring into the sky twelve and thirteen thousand 
feet, arrayed in open ranks and Stpiry pinnacled groups partially sepa- 
rated by tremendous canyons and amphitheaters; gardens on their 
sunny brows, avalanches thundering down their long white slopes, 
cataracts roaring gray and foaming in the crooked rugged gorges, and 
glaciers in their shadowy recesses working in silence, slowly completmg 
their sculptures; new-borr lakes at their feet, blue and green, free or 
encumbered with driftmg icebergs like miniature Arctic Oceans, 
shining, sparkling, calm as stars." 

This land of enchantments is a land of enchanted climate. Its 
summers are warm, but not too warm; diy, but not too dry; its 
nights cold and marvelously starry. 



28 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

The world-famous Yosemite Valley was discovered in 1851 by 
mounted volunteers pursuing Indians into their fastnesses. Because 
of its extraordinary character and quite exceptional beauty it quickly 
became celebrated; but it was not until 1874 that a road was built 
into it. Until then it was approached only by trail. 

THE VALLEY AND ITS WATERFALLS 

No matter what their expectation, most visitors are delightfully 
astonished upon entering the Yosemite Valley. The sheer immensity 
of the precipices on either side of the valley's peaceful floor; the lofti- 
ness and the romantic suggestion of the numerous waterfalls; the 
majesty of the granite walls; and the unreal, almost fairy quality of 
the ever-varying whole, can not be successfully foretold. 

This valley was once a tortuous river canyon. So rapidly was it 
cut by the Merced that the tributary valleys soon remained hanging 
high on either side. Then the canyon became the bed of a great 
glacier. It was widened as well as deepened, and as a consequence 
the hanging character of the side valleys was accentuated. 

There were hundreds, thousands, of other ice-fiUed canyons in the 
Sierra; but in none did the glaciers accomplish as much as they did 
in the Yosemite Valley. Why ? Because there the Sierra granites, as 
a rule solid and exceptionally resistant, were traversed by thou- 
sands of fissures and therefore readily scooped out. 

The Yosemite Falls, for instance, drops 1,430 feet in one sheer fall, 
a height equal to nine Niagara Falls piled one on top of the other. 
The Lower Yosemite Fall, immediately below, has a drop of 320 feet, 
or two Niagaras more. Vernal Falls has the same height, while 
lUilouette Falls is 40 feet higher. The Nevada Falls drops 600 feet 
sheer; the celebrated Bridal Veil Fall 620 feet, while the Ribbon 
Falls, highest of all, drops 1,612 feet sheer, a straight fall ten times 
as great as Niagara. Nowhere else in the world may be had a water 
spectacle such as this. 

Similarly the sheer summits. Cathedral Rocks rise 2,500 feet 
perpendicular from the valley; El Capitan, 3,600 feet; Sentinel 
Dome, 4,100 feet; Half Dome, 4,900 feet; Cloud's Rest, 6,000 feet. 

Among these monsters the Merced sings its winding way. 

The falls are at their best in May and June while the winter snows 
are melting. They are stiU fine in July but after that decrease 
rapidly in volume. 

THE BEAUTIFUL TUOLUMNE VALLEY 

The Yosemite VaUey, extraordinary though it is from both the 
scenic and the scientific points of view, is an exceedingly small part 
of the Yosemite National Park; but until the summer of 1915, when 



OUE NATIONAL PARKS. 29 

the Department of the Interior acquired possession of the old Tioga 
Road, the magnificent country north of the valley was known only 
to a few enthusiastic mountaineers who went in yearly with camp 
outfits. The old Tioga Road was built in 1881 to a mine soon after 
abandoned. Its recent repair by the Government has opened to aU 
one of the finest scenic sections in America, a country dotted with 
splendid snowy summits, grown with glorious forests, and watered 
with rushing trout streams. 

And thus is added to the amazing water spectacle for wliich the 
valley is famous stiU another kind of Yosemite waterfall destined 
to world-wide celebrity. The Tuolumne River, descending sharply 
to the head of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, becomes, in John Muir's 
phrase, "one wild, exulting, onrushing mass of snowy purple bloom 
spreading over glacial waves of granite without any definite channel, 
gUding in magnificent silver plumes, dashing and foaming through 
huge bowlder dams, leaping high in the air in wheel-like whirls, dis- 
playing glorious enthusiasm, tossing from side to side, doubling, 
ghnting, singing in exuberance of mountain energy." The crowning 
feature of this mad spectacle are the water wheels which rise fifty feet 
or more into the air when the slanting river strikes obstructions. 

In addition to its many other attractions, the Yosemite National 
Park contains three groves of sequoias, the celebrated " Big Trees of 
California." One of these trees, the Grizzly Giant, has a diameter of 
29.6 feet and a height of 204 feet. 

IX. 
THE SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK 

Special Characteristic: Largest and Oldest Trees in the World 

And they said. Go to, let us build us a city and a tower whose top 
•^^ niay reach unto heaven. 

Thus is recorded, in the eleventh chapter of Genesis, the building 
of the Tower of Babel. Wliile this tower was doubtless still standing, 
and a hundred years or two before the birth of Abraham, a tiny seed 
in the warm soil of a mountain slope on quite the opposite side of the 
world thrust into the light of day a slender green spike which was 
destined, during an existence of more than four thousand years, to 
become itself a lofty tower; noble in form, "with a physiognomy 
almost Godlike," as John Muir puts it, pulsating with life to its top- 
most leaflet more than three hundred feet above the ground, and 
giving forth a babel of bird song to the accompaniment which the 
summer winds played upon its many millions of tiny leaves. 

On the stump of this prostrate sequoia tree, one of the noblest of 
the celebrated Big Trees of California, John Muir counted more than 



30 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

four thousand rings, a ring for every year of its life. Its trunk, 
exclusive of hark, was thirty-live feet eight inches in diameter. As 
the hark of the very largest sequoias is two feet or more in thickness, 
this giant must have measured forty feet in diameter when it was 
still growing on one of the slopes of the Kings River. 

LARGEST OF THE MONSTERS 

In the Sequoia National Park, upon the upper slopes of the Sierra 
Nevada Mountains in central California, and in the little General 
Grant National Park six miles away and under the same management, 
grow 1,166,000 sequoia trees, of which 12,000 are more than ten feet 
in diameter. Some of the others have these dimensions: 

General Sherman Tree: Diameter, 36.5 feet; height, 279.9 feet. 

General Grant Tree: Diameter, 35 feet; height, 264 feet. 

Abraham Lincohi Tree: Diameter, 31 feet; height, 270 feet. 

California Tree: Diameter, 30 feet; height, 260 feet. 

George Washington Tree: Diameter, 29 feet; height, 255 feet. 

WiUiam McKinley Tree: Diameter, 28 feet; height, 291 feet. 

Dalton Tree: Diameter, 27 feet; height, 292 feet: 
There are sequoia trees of great size in several other parts of Cali- 
fornia also, notably in the Yosemite National Park, where three dis- 
tinct groves are found ; but by far the greatest number, and tlie indi- 
vidual trees of greatest size, are in the Sequoia National Park and its 
little neighbor. 

HOW TO VISUALIZE A BIG TREE 

It is extremely difficult to realize what the dimensions of these 
trees really mean. 

To visualize as best you can the greatest of those now standing, the 
General Sherman Tree, measure off and stake its diameter, 36 feet 6 
inches, upon the ground in front of a church the height of whose 
steeple you can readily ascertain. Then stand back a distance equal 
to the height of the tree, 280 feet, and look hard at the stakes whose 
distance apart represents the thickness of the trunk. 

Now raise your eyes slowly, imagining this trunk rising in front of 
the church, tapering very slightly as it rises. When you are looking 
upward at an angle of forty-five degrees from the spot where you are 
standing (and this will not be difficult to calculate) you wiU be looking 
at the point where the top of the General Sherman Tree would be if it 
were growing in front of your church instead of in the Sequoia 
National Park. The known height of the steeple will help you verify 
this calculation. 

It wiU help your comprehension of the great size of these trees to 
know that a box big enough to have easily held the ill-fated ship 
Lusitania, one of the largest ever built, could be made from inch 



OUE NATIONAL PARKS. ol 

boards sawed from any one of these great sequoias, with boards 
enough left over to build a dozen houses. Automobiles and six- 
horse teams have been driven up and down the fallen trunks of several 
great sequoias, and there are regular wagon roads running through 
gaps in the trunks of several others in our national parks. Two par- 
allel street car lines and a driveway might be run through the trunk 
of several of the very largest. 

THE OLDEST LIVING THING 

But the age of the sequoia is still more difficult to reahze. It is 
beyond compare the oldest Hving thmg. 

Several of the trees now growing in hearty maturity in the Sequoia 
National Park were vigorous youngsters before the pyramids were 
built on the Egyptian desert before Babylon reached its prime. ' 
Hundreds of them were thriving before the heroic age of ancient 
Greece — while, in fact, the rough Indo-Germanic ancestors of the 
Greeks were still swarming from the north. Thousands were lusty 
youths through all the ages of Greek art and Roman wars. Tens of 
thousands were flourishing trees when Christ was born in Bethlehem. 

But with all its vast age, the sequoia to-day is the embodiment of 
serene vigor. No description, says Muu*, can give any adequate idea 
of its majesty, much less its beauty. He calls it nature's forest mas- 
terpiece. He dwells upon its patrician bearing, its suggestion of 
ancient stock, its strange air of other days, its thoroughbred look 
inherited from the long ago. "Poised in the fullness of strength and 
beauty, stern and solemn in mien, it glows with eager enthusiastic 
life to the tip of every leaf and branch and far-reaching root, calm 
as a granite dome, the first to feel the touch of the rosy beams of 
morning, the last to bid the sun good night." 

The sequoia is regular and symmetrical in general form. Its power- 
ful, stately trunk is purphsh to cinnamon brown and rises without a 
branch a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet — which is as high or 
higher than the tops of most forest trees. Its bulky hmbs shoot 
boldly out on every side. Its foliage, the most feathery and dehcate 
of aU the conifers, is densely massed. The bright green cones are 
about two and a half inches long, generating seeds scarcely more than 
an eighth of an inch across. The wood is almost indestructible except 
by fire. Fallen trunks and broken branches lie for centuries unde- 
cayed and almost unaltered. 

The sequoias are the glory, as they were the cause, of the Sequoia 
National Park. Scattered here and there over great areas, they 
cluster chiefly in thirteen separate groves, and it is in these groves 
that they attain their greatest size and luxuriance. 



32 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

But they are by no means the only attractions of this national park, 
which many frequenters declare nature has equipped best of all for 
the joys and pleasures of mountain living. 

IDEAL FOR CAMPING OUT 

It is the ideal place to camp out. It is a country of magnificent 
mountain scenery, easily accessible when once you are in it. Its 
peaks are among the loftiest, its canyons among the deepest and most 
romantic. Its summer temperatures are even and bracing. Its 
summers are practically without rain. 

Across its borders north and east opens up a mountain region, on 
the crest of the Sierra, of unexcelled grandeur. Mount Whitney, the 
highest mountain in the United States, 14,501 feet, lies upon its east- 
ern boundary. The Kings and the Kern Rivers have few scenic 
equals. These and its many other rushing streams abound in trout 

X. 

THE HOT SPRINGS RESERVATION 

Special Characteristic: Curative Hot Springs Possessing Radio-Active 

Properties 

AS different, almost, as possible from the great scenic national 
parks which we have -been considering, but in its own par- 
ticular way as extraordinary as any of them, the Hot Springs 
Reservation in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas must be accorded 
a distinguished place among American resorts of national char- 
acter and ownership. The reservation is the oldest national 
park, having received that status in 1832, forty years before the 
wonders of the Yellowstone first inspired Congress with the idea that 
scenery was a national asset deserving of preservation for the use and 
enjoyment of succeeding generations. 

No aesthetic consideration was involved in this early act of national 
conservation. Congress was inspired only by the undoubted, but at 
that time inexplicable, power of these waters to alleviate certain 
bodily ills. The motive was to retain these unique waters in public 
possession in order that they should be available to all persons for all 
time at a minimum, even a nominal, cost. 

IN THE HEART OF THE OZARKS 

The low, irregular mountain masses known as the Ozarks cover the 
greater part of southern Missouri and overlap northern Arkansas, 
where, in marked contrast with the surrounding plains, they become 
higher, more rugged and lieavily timbered. 



OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 33 

The country is one of much beauty. Hot Springs Mountain, from 
whose sides flow the cleansing waters, is about fifty miles west by 
south from Little Rock. Here, as early as 1804, began the settlement 
which has developed into the handsome prosperous city of 16,000 
inhabitants known as Hot Springs. It is a resort city, made wealthy 
from the many thousands of visitors seeking health from the adjacent 
Goveriunent springs and pleasure in the high and beautiful neigh- 
hood country with its excellent drives and woodland paths, its 
mountain and river views, its social gayeties and its exceptional golf. 

INTEBE STING INDIAN TRADITIONS 

On the borders of the city at the mountain's foot lies the reserva- 
tion, a tract of 912 acres enclosing all the forty-six hot springs. 
Eleven bathhouses are in the reservation and a dozen more in the 
city, aU under Government regulation. There are also cold-water 
springs of curative value. In the city are many hotels and boarding 
houses with rates ranging from lowest to highest. The Department 
of the Interior has spent altogether more than a million dollars on the 
development of the reservation. The reservation contains, also, an 
Army and Navy Hospital. 

Dr. William P. Parks, superintendent of the reservation, states in 
his annual report for 1915 that while the baths are constantly given 
for such ailments as seem to be benefited in the experience of physi- 
cians who have prescribed their use and carefully observed the 
results, there are still many physicians throughout the country who, 
never having themselves tested the springs, hesitate to send patients 
there. 

" No physician who is thorough and looks for the best results from 
the medicines he gives," says Dr. Parks, "would think of prescribing 
a drug whose physiological effects and therapeutic value had not been 
scientifically proven and described." 

A perfect explanation, this, of a natural scientific conservatism. 

The War Department's years of experience in the Army and Navy 
Hospital, however, is thoroughly convincing, and the medical staff 
officially affirm the waters' marked curative value for rheumatic and 
many grave ailments more or less kindred. 

Recently the Department of the Interior has estabhshed on the 
reservation the Oertel system of graduated exercise which has proved 
so successful at the celebrated springs of Bad Nauheim, Germany. 
Courses have been laid out on the mountain slopes with distances 
scientifically estabhshed and plainly marked by monuments. The 
length and character of the walks are determined by physicians 
according to the condition and progress of the patient. 

Tradition has it that the curative properties of the hot springs were 
known to the Indians long before the Spanish invasion. It is prob- 
able that they were known to De Soto who died in 1542 less than a 



34 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

hundred miles away. It is tradition that Indian tribes warred for 
their possession but that finally a truce was made which enabled all 
tribes to avail alike of their waters. 

Government analyses of the waters disclose more than twenty 
chemical constituents, but it is not these nor their combination to 
which is prmcipally attributed the water's unquestioned virtue in 
many diseased conditions, but to their remarkable radioactivity. The 
Department of the Interior will send full information to inquirers, 

XL 
THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO 

(National Monument Administered by the Department of Agriculture) 

THE rain falling in the plowed field forms rivulets in the fur- 
rows. The rivulets unite in a muddy torrent in the roadside 
gutter. With succeeding showers the gutter wears an everdeep- 
ening chamiel in the soft soil. With the passing season the 
gutter becomes a gully. Here and there, in places, its banks under- 
mine and faU in. Here and there the rivulets from the field wear 
tiny tributaiy gullies. Between the breaks in the banks and the 
tributaries, irregular masses of earth remain standing, sometimes 
resembling mimic cliffs, sometimes washed and worn into mimic 
peaks and spires. 

Such roadside erosion is familiar to us aU. A hundred times we 
have idly noted the fantastic water-carved walls and minaretted 
slopes of these ditches. But seldom, perhaps, have we realized that 
the muddy roadside ditch and the world famous Grand Canyon of the 
Colorado are, from Nature's standpoint, identical; that they differ 
only in soil and size. 

The arid States of our great southwest constitute an enormous 
plateau or table land from four to eight thousand feet above sea level. 
It is plateau of sun-baked conglomerate and loose soils from which 
emerge occasional mountain masses of more or less solid rock. Rain 
seldom falls, but in winter the snows lie heavy in the mountains. In 
the spring the snows melt and torrents of water wear temporary 
beds in the loose soils. Rivers are few and small. Some lose them- 
selves in the drying sands. Others gather into a few desert water 
systems. The largest of these is that which, in its lower courses, 
bears the name of the Colorado River. 

In ages before history the Colorado River probably flowed upon 
the surface of this lofty table land. But, like the roadside ditch, it 
gradually wore an ever-deepenmg channel. In time, as with the 
roadside ditch, the banks caved in and the cm-rent carried the soil 
away. Seismic disturbances may have helped. The ever busy 
chisels of the untiring winds have carved and polished tlirough 
untold centuries. 



OUK NATIONAL PAEKS. 35 

AN UNPARALLELED SPECTACLE 

Today the Colorado flows through a series of self-dug canyons 
hundreds of miles long, a mile deep, and in some places a score of miles 
across the top. The sides of these canyons are carved and fretted 
beyond description, almost beyond belief; and the strata of rock and 
soil exposed by the river's excavations are marvellously colored. 
The blues and grays and mauves and reds are second in glory only 
to the canyon's size and sculpture. The colors change with every 
changing hour. The morning and the evening shadows play magi- 
cian's tricks. 

That portion of the canyon which affords the finest spectacle has 
been set aside by Congress as a national monument. It is situated 
in northeastern Arizona and is called the Grand Canyon of the Colo- 
rado. It constitutes one of the most astonishing phenomena in 
nature and one of the stupendous sights of the world. 

The Colorado River is formed, in southern Utah, by the confluence 
of the Grand and the Green Rivers. The Grand drains the western 
Rockies in Colorado. The Green rises in northern Utah, and drains 
also a corner of Wyoming. Together they gather the waters of three 
hundred thousand square miles of mountains. ''Ten million cascade 
brooks," writes J. W. Powell, "unite to form a hundred rivers beset 
with cataracts ; a hundred roaring rivers unite to form the Colorado, 
a mad, turbid stream." 

Southwest from Utah, the Colorado passes through the noble 
Marble Canyon and swings west between the mile-high waUs of the 
mighty Grand Canyon. Thence, emerging into more open country, 
it skirts Nevada and Cahfornia, cuts through Mexico and deposits 
its vast burden of mud in the Gulf of Cahfornia. 

MOSAIC OF DESCRIPTION 

Who can describe the Grand Canyon? 

"More mysterious in its depth than the Himalayas in their height," 
wi'ites John C. Van Dyke, "the Grand Canyon remains not the eighth 
but thejirst wonder of the world. There is nothing Hke it." 

"Looking down, more than half a mile into this fifteen-by-two- 
hundred-and-eighteen-mile paint pot," writes Joaquin Miller, "I con- 
tinually ask: Is any fifty miles of Mother Earth that I have known 
as fearful, or any part as fearful, as fuU of glory, as full of God?" 

"To the eye educated to any other," writes Charles Dudley Warner, 
"it may be shocking, grotesque, incomprehensible; but those who 
have long and carefully studied the Grand Canyon do not hesitate 
to pronounce it by far the most subhme of all earthly spectacles." 

"The Grand Canyon of Arizona fills me with awe," writes Theodore 
Roosevelt. "It is beyond comparison — beyond description; abso- 
lutely unparalleled throughout the wide world." 



36 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 

"A pageant of ghastly desolation and yet of frightful vitahty, such 
as neither Dante nor Milton in their most subhme conceptions ever 
even approached," writes Wilham Winter. ''Your heart is moved 
with feeling that is far too deep for words." 

"It has a thousand differing moods," writes Hamlin Garland. 
"No one can know it for what it is who has not lived with it every 
day of the year. It is like a mountain range — a cloud today, a waU 
of marble tomorrow. When the light falls into it, harsh, direct and 
searching, it is great, but not beautiful. The Hues are chaotic, dis- 
turbing — but wait ! The clouds and the sunset, the moonrise and 
the storm will transform it into a splendor no mountain range can 
surpass. Pealvs will shift and glow, walls darken, crags take fire, 
and gray-green mesas, dimly seen, take on the gleam of opalescent 
lakes of mountain water." 

"It seems a gigantic statement for even Nature to make aU in 
one mighty stone word," writes John Muir. "Wildness so Godful, 
cosmic, primeval, bestows a new sense of earth's beauty and size. 
* * * But the colors, the living, rejoicing colors, chanting, morn- 
ing and evening, in chorus to heaven! Whose brush or pencil, how- 
ever loviagly inspired, can give us these? In the supreme flaming 
glory of sunset the whole canyon is transfigured, as if aU the life and 
Hght of centuries of sunshine stored up in the rocks was now being 
poured forth as from one glorious fountain, flooding both earth and 
sky." 

DIFFICULT TO COMPREHEND 

Even the most superficial description of this enormous spectacle 
may not be put in words. The watcher upon the rim overlooks a 
thousand square miles of pyramids and minarets carved from the 
painted depths. Many miles away and more than a mile below the 
level of his feet he sees a tiny silver thread which he knows is the 
giant Colorado. He is numbed by the spectacle. At first he can- 
not comprehend it. There is no measure, nothing which the eye can 
grasp, the mind fathom. 

It may be hours before he can even slightly adjust himself to the 
titanic spectacle, before it ceases to be utter chaos; and not untd then 
does he begin to exclaim in rapture. And he never wholly adjusts 
himself, for with dawning appreciation comes growing wonder. Com- 
prehension Hes always just beyond his reach. But it will help to 
descend one of these trails which zigzag do"ttTi the precipitous cUffs 
to the river's muddy edge. 

The Grand Canyon was first reported to the civilized world by the 
early Spanish explorers in 1540. It was first described in 1851 by 
the Sitgreaves Expedition. The War Department explored the navi- 
gable waters from the south in 1858 but stopped at the foot of the 
canyons. 



OUR NATIONAL PAEKS. 37 

MAJOR POWELL'S FIRST EXPLORATION 

No exploration of the Grand Canyon was made until 1869, when 
Major J. W. Powell, who afterward founded the United States Geo- 
logical Survey, made a perilous passage with a party of nine men in 
four small boats. This exploration constitutes one of the most 
romantic adventures in American history. Until then it was unknown, 

"Yet enough had been seen to foment rumor," Major Powell wrote 
in his report to the Smithsonian Institution, ''and many wonderfid 
stories have been told in the hunter's cabin and prospector's camp. 
Stories were related of parties entering the gorge in boats and being 
carried do^^^^ with fearful velocity into whirlpools, where all were 
overwhelmed in the abyss of waters; others, of underground passages 
for the great river, into which boats had passed never to be seen again. 
It was currently believed that the river was lost under the rocks for 
several hundred miles. There were other accounts of great falls whose 
roaring music could be heard on distant mountain summits." 

The passage, while it developed none of these reported dangers, 
was sufficiently perilous. Boats were repeatedly upset in the rapids, 
food was nearly exhausted, and the adventurers many times barely 
escaped destruction. Four men who deserted the party, terrified, 
attempted to climb the walls, but were never heard from agam. 

The Indian legend of the Grand Canyon is picturesque. There was 
a great chief who mourned the death of his wife, and would not be 
comforted. To him came Ta-v\^^oats, one of the Indian gods, and 
told him that his wife was in a happier land to which he would take 
him that he might see for liimself, if, upon his return he would cease 
to mourn. The cliief promised. Then Ta-vwoats made a trail 
thi'ough the mountains that guarded that beautiful land. 

This trail was the canyon gorge of the Colorado. Through it Ta- 
v^^oats led the chief; and when they had returned the god exacted 
from the chief a promise that he would tell no one of its joys lest, 
through discontent with the circumstances of this world, others should 
desire to go there. Then Ta-vwoats rolled a river into the gorge, a 
mad, raging stream, that should engulf any that might attempt to 
enter thereby. This river was the Colorado. 



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